1/09/2008

I have to apologies for complaining about something I know nothing about. I indicated that the Adium IM end key was reassigned to a different feature, command-right arrow switches IM windows much like the command-grave keystroke.

While this is correct, the Adium IM end key is the func-right arrow as opposed to the command-right arrow in other applications like the blogger text box I am typing this into. So, while I have to retract my innacuracy it does offer the opportunity to whine about another mac UI inconsistency.

When should I be using the func-right arrow over the command-right arrow. I would have thought that the concepts of home and end would have been fairly simple for a UI designer to grok. Such is the ineffectiveness of the mac UI.

1 comment:

Glen
said...

From the Apple HIG:

"Pressing the Home key is equivalent to moving the scrollers all the way to the top and to the left. In a text document, for example, pressing Home scrolls to the beginning of the document; in a spreadsheet, it may scroll to the beginning of the spreadsheet or to the beginning of a row. These keys should also work in scrolling lists to display the top or bottom of the list.

End is the opposite of Home: It scrolls to the end of a document.

If the beginning or end of the document is already reached, pressing Home or End produces a system alert sound. Pressing the Home or End key has no effect on the location of the insertion point or selected data."

Insertion and selection are based solely on the arrow keys and modifiers, home and end are not part of them.

Any application that assigns functionality to Command right arrow or Command left arrow is violating the HIG as these key combinations are reserved for localization. Breaking your app for non-Roman keyboards is bad.